"Smith, Wilbur - Ballantyne 02 - Men of Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

plain of the beautiful camel-thorn trees to feed those fires.

The settlement was strewn about under dirty weatherworn canvas, although
already some sheets of the ubiquitous corrugated iron had been
laboriously transported from the coast and knocked up into boxlike
shanties.

Some of these, with a fine sense of order, had been arranged in an
approximation of a straight line, forming the first rudimentary streets.

These belonged to the "kopie-wallopers", the previously nomadic diamond
buyers who had until recently roamed the diggings, but who had now found
it worth their while to set up permanent shop below the crumbling
remains of Colesberg kopje. According to the infant diamond laws of the
Boer Free State, each licensed buyer was obliged to display his name
prominently. This they did in crudely lettered signs upon the little
iron sweatbox offices, but most of them went further and flew a
disproportionately large gaudy and fancifully designed flag from a mast
on the roof to announce to the diggers that the incumbent was in office
and ready to do business. The flags lent a carnival air to the
settlement.

Zouga Ballantyne walked beside the offside lead ox of his team,
following one of the narrow meandering rutted tracks that ran through
the settlement. Occasionally the team had to be swung to avoid the
tailings that had spilled into the track from one of the recovery
stations, or to avoid a deep morass formed by spilled sewerage and
washings from the sorting-tables.

The settlement was densely crowded upon itself, that was the first
impression that struck Zouga. He was a man of the plains and savannah
forests, accustomed to long uninterrupted horizons, and the crowding
jarred upon his senses. The diggers lived within touching distance of
each other, every man attempting to get as close to his claim as he
could so that the gravel that he won from it would not have to be
carried too far to the place where he would process it.

Zouga had hoped to find an open space upon which to outspan his wagon
and erect the big bell tent, but there was no open space within a
quarter of a mile of the kopje.

. He glanced back at Aletta on the box. She was sitting very still,
moving only as the wagon jolted, looking straight ahead as though
oblivious of the almost naked men, many wearing merely a scrap of trade
cloth about the loins, who milled the crunchy lumps of yellow gravel and
then shovelled it into the waiting cradles. Swearing or singing as they
worked, all of them oiled with their own sweat in the cruel white
sunlight.

The filth appalled even Zouga, who had known the kraals of the Mashona